Inter-Review

Jennifer Case (JC): Our essay collections came out from university presses the exact same week. On the surface, they explore different themes—motherhood, in mine, and coming of age queer in the South, in yours—and yet they speak to each other in lovely, surprising ways, which I'm sure we'll get into. But to start: One of the things I most admired about your work was your control of tone across long-form pieces. “Someone Older: A Catalog of Dangers” struck me in particular for the sometimes disarming ease with which it moves between tones. The essay began light-hearted, with the sister's attraction to older men, before hinting at something sinister, becoming light again, and then fully moving into a dark exploration of abuse in artistic and/or queer mentorships. The essay kept me on my toes—and then up at night. It is incredibly well crafted, and such a good example of your ability to write long-form, personal essays that integrate research and follow discursions. What drew you to these longer forms, including “Public Swim” and “Ear Training,” at a time when it's becoming harder to place longer essays? This book leans into them.Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers (ELR): I've always been drawn to “slow burn” approaches in art and to long conversations. Maybe it's my Southern upbringing, where long-winded stories from my older relatives were an important part of how we learned about family history and history in general. The main reason I started writing essays in addition to my poetry was to allow myself more space for narrative, argument, and description. The arguments that swirl through “Someone Older” are so complex and maybe even erroneous at times that I knew I could never articulate them in a shorter essay or poem. And the essay also makes me lose sleep, even to this day. An earlier version of “Someone Older” was about two-thirds the length of the current one. It was decent; a journal offered to run it online after it placed in a major contest. But I chickened out due to its volatile and intimate familial content, which I wasn't ready to have so easily available to others. The version of the essay that's in the book is the result of a deep-dive revision after the book was already under contract. Length wasn't a constraint anymore, which was enormously freeing.I understand the cultural pressure for short-form literary works—in some ways, it's more democratic, giving room for more voices—but I do think we lose some of the best writing when we're always demanding brevity.JC: Those are good points. These are dense essays in the best way. They are cerebral and thought-provoking, and the paragraphs have a heft to them. Although there is dialogue, it is minimal. There isn't a lot of white space until “Encumber” and “Some Mothers.” It of course didn't escape my notice that the two fragmented essays were about early motherhood, and in We Are Animals, I also found myself leaning into a fragmented structure in order to discuss that physical and mental space.What led you to use a fragmented form when exploring motherhood and parenthood in particular? And have you gone back to writing denser-looking essays, or are you continuing to explore this structure?ELR: Years ago, when Eula Biss published On Immunity, someone asked her in an interview why she had turned to shorter forms after the hefty, cerebral essays for which she'd received acclaim. Her answer: parenthood and time constraints. There's only so much time to try to finish your thought on the page before the baby needs to be fed again, before the kid wakes up from their nap, before you run out of steam. I didn't understand her comment fully at the time. but after I became a parent, I found my whole day fragmented. Building an essay via smaller threads or sections is friendlier to those of us who don't have lots of hours for the deep immersion that a long, expository essay may require.I was skeptical of the lyric essay for a long time, worrying that it might be gimmicky if not done well, relying too much on impression, association, and mood rather than the force of rhetoric and argument or narrative. Post-parenthood, and after teaching the lyric essay to students, I began to see that privileging more “linear” forms of essay logic is likely a function of patriarchy and white supremacy. The lyric essay—with its leaps and gaps and refusal to progress in a way that aligns with dominant Western conventions—might be thought of as a queer and feminist space. For these reasons, I dig it. It fits the jumpy and dreamy way my brain works much of the time, always moving from one thing to the next. However, I still love more traditional long-form essays for their heft and immersive quality. They just require so much more time to finish.JC: Your description fits my experience as well. I often get asked why I wrote We Are Animals as an essay collection, and the truth is I simply didn't have the headspace to hold a book in my mind. When my kids were young, I needed to approach the material through essays—and often fragmented essays—instead. That's what early parenthood demanded.ELR: This characterizes my experience, too.JC: Speaking of book structures, in the industry, we talk a lot about essay collections versus memoir-in-essays versus memoirs—and why a writer might choose one over the other. Yours read very much like an essay collection, each piece standing alone. Yet “Sarah,” as a character, and the “Guitar Teacher” acted as connective hooks, especially as the collection progressed.This all makes me curious. When did you begin to draft the first essay, and when did you draft the last? And how far along in the project did you realize you were writing a book, or begin to write toward and for the book? What did you do in revisions to help the collection cohere?ELR: This was a slow book, really a “back burner” project while I was writing poetry most of the time. The first essay in this collection, “A Bearing,” was selected by Roxane Gay for The Rumpus right after I wrote it, in 2013 or early 2014. My first book of poems had just come out, and my brain and body were empty of poems. I was doing the Kenyon Review Fellowship then, so I had time to muck around with new work and new genres, a rare luxury. If you look closely at that essay, though, it's not as seamless; you can see a rookie trying to figure out the balance of showing and telling. I was trying to teach myself how to write prose.From there, I started writing a couple essays every year. The last essays I wrote for the collection are the shorter, lyric pieces, including “Some Mothers.” I wrote “Some Mothers” after a friend said she was desperate to see me take on parenting as the last subject matter in the book. Then it took me a minute to find a publisher willing to accept a collection with so many subjects and approaches. Numerous agents asked me if I would be willing to reshape the book as a single-subject memoir to make it more marketable.JC: I got that response often, too: “rewrite it as a memoir.” I didn't have the heart to do that, yet there was definitely pressure. What do you think are the advantages or joys of an essay collection with multiple subjects and approaches? (And I ask that as someone who clearly loves the form, has obviously written one, and enjoys reading them.)ELR: Personally I love essay collections for their generous, swirling agglomeration of narrative, meditation, and arguments. Reading them ignites both my brain and heart. Those of us who write essays tend not to think strictly in terms of linear narrative, so memoir, at least in its traditional sense, doesn't make total sense. I also like the flexibility of form in an essay collection: You can place something expository next to something more lyric, or a narrative next to something more meditative. It's like listening to the contrasting movements of a symphony.JC: Well said!ELR: While we're on the subject: much of the narrative element across We Are Animals centers on the births of your own children—especially the birth of your son. This serves as a kind of springboard from which to explore motherhood more broadly: socially, culturally, and in other species. Yet some essays put other major subjects at the center. For example, the penultimate essay, “Animals on the Eve of Extinction,” has a broader ecological focus. With writing and assembling a nonfiction collection, I think many writers bump against two opposing poles: The essays are all very similar and/or about one major thing, or else the essays are really disparate in their concerns and subjects. When putting together We Are Animals, how did you think about striking a balance between variation and continuity across essays?JC: My goal with the project was to unpack the intensity of early motherhood—all the ways it confounded me and challenged me, personally, intellectually, and politically. To do so (once I realized I was writing a book), I made a list of all the topics and questions I wanted to address: motherhood and climate change, breastfeeding and evolutionary biology, breast pumps and dairy farms, racial disparities in maternal health, et cetera. I then compartmentalized and approached each subject through an individual essay. This worked to my benefit, since it allowed the collection to cohere around early motherhood, and yet each essay still has a unique focus.ELR: I am impressed that your process was that focused and deliberate! Maybe I should try that next time.JC: It was deliberate, but still certainly messy. After drafting everything, I had to make sure I wasn't redundant and that the points I was making were all in the right spot. For instance, a few of the essays initially tackled evolutionary biology. During revisions, I condensed some of that content in other essays in order to highlight it more fully in “The Mother–Infant Dyad.”ELR: I met you at a reading for your first book, Sawbill: A Search for Place, back when I lived in Arkansas for a couple of years. Having read that book and followed your editorial work at Terrain.org, I was surprised to discover how different We Are Animals is from your previous work. There's a shift away from what I typically think of as place-based writing to a critical examination of the politics and complexities of birth and motherhood. How did this shift in subject matter change your relationship to nonfiction? Or, given that some of your book focuses on birthwork and birthing in Arkansas, do you see We Are Animals as a new arm of place-based work?JC: This shift really surprised me. Becoming a mother changed my relationship to place—and thus my writing. “Place” was no longer something outside of me, but also inside of me: My body became a place, pressed upon and impacted by the regions and cultures in which I resided. The essay “BabyCenter: An Essay on Place” was one of the first essays I drafted for this project, and it serves as a kind of transition between my place-based writing and my motherhood work. In that essay, I see myself negotiating between my parenting self and my place-based self, and trying to find how the really embodied experience of motherhood fit.Overall, I still see We Are Animals as place-based and environmental, but I do think we have to broaden (or perhaps narrow) our conceptions of place-based writing in order to do that. The womb, the body, and the history of a society's impact on the body need to become a place as worthy of examining as any other. We Are Animals tries to do that as it explores what it means to mother in the United States today, especially the South.ELR: Yes, I do see the book as ecological in its orientation. Speaking of Arkansas, one of my favorite essays was “Birth Work in the Bible Belt.” You reveal a more complex understanding of religion, politics, gender, and race in the South, challenging what an outsider might assume about the region. I've lived in Arkansas, was born and raised in North Carolina, and consider myself a Southerner even though I'm now in the Midwest. In Miss Southeast, I was hoping to do some of what you accomplished in “Birth Work in the Bible Belt”: showing the ways in which some conservative parts of the South (and other areas with conservative social politics) also have an active contingent of folks doing advocacy and activism, even if that work looks different from what some might expect. What was your initial motivation behind writing this particular essay? What did you discover in the process of talking to and working with the birth workers?JC: My motivation was exactly what you described: to explore and unpack how advocacy doesn't always look the way we expect it to, but that it nonetheless exists, and deserves to be recognized and respected for what it is. When I was pregnant in Arkansas, I struggled to feel safe. The socially progressive part of me wanted birth work to look a certain way, and didn't know what to do when the most active advocate for women I could see was a deeply Christian, African American doula who also has voiced antivaccine sentiments and conservative political perspectives. Nicolle is and was amazing, and I respect her so much, but she definitely challenged my conceptions. I wrote the essay to get into that messiness, to break through that political divide and try to reveal—and celebrate—the complexity of birth work in the South.ELR: You've probably heard the saying: “If you're not 100 percent sure you want kids, you shouldn't have them.” I started questioning this logic when my son was born because it hasn't really fit my experiences. I love my children, but there are things parenthood has required of me that I occasionally resent or find more challenging than I can express. And yet my wife and I went to great lengths to have children in the first place. (We are one of the couples, as you describe in your essay, who used IVF to become parents. The pregnancies were definitely intended.)It was refreshing—and sometimes painful, due to my own sense of deep recognition—to read the parts of your book that deal with emotional ambivalence around mothering. As you point out, mothers are allowed “very little room for discontent.” To admit this particular discontent feels like a risk on so many levels both culturally and domestically. That being said, which essay (or essays) in this collection was the most difficult to write, argumentatively, and/or emotionally?JC: So much of the book felt like a risk, honestly. Although I think discontentment and ambivalence are actually quite common emotions for new parents, mothers are rarely given space to talk about them, and so we tend to hold them tight, with shame and unease. Part of me still fears people will read the book and say, “Jennifer Case. What a terrible mother!”That said, the most difficult essay for me was definitely “To Hatch Intimacy from Despair,” which is about prenatal and postpartum depression, and what it was like to have a child I hadn't intended—or wanted—and the slow, sometimes painful process of bonding. I wanted and needed to write honestly about that experience, but I also was cognizant of the impact the essay might have on my son. Writing honestly about prenatal depression, and its intensity, yet not harming my son, was a challenge. The essay pushes against the narrative our society tells about postpartum depression, too, so it also felt like an argumentative risk.ELR: I really think those risks paid off. The book both challenged my conceptions of motherhood and hit home with its complicated honesty. Thank you for giving me the chance to read it.